Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold

Tony Liang

University of British Columbia

October 3, 2024

What is protein?

  • Building blocks of life.
  • Involved in every important activity that happens inside every living thing.
  • We know very few 3D structures of unique proteins, and through long time of studies.

What’s special of protein structure?

  • Protein function is closely related to its structure.

  • So, knowing structure helps scientists design new medicines and understand diseases.

However . . .

  • Figuring out a protein’s structure is extremely hard.

  • It’s like solving 3D puzzle with thousands of pieces, yet without knowing what the final picture looks like.

  • Usually done by long time and expensive experiments.

Fig. 1 The various structures formed by amino acids and proteins.1

Thanks to magical AI

Alphafold

  • Rise from a competition “Olympics for protein folding”
    • Given an amino acid sequence, can you predict its protein structure?
  • Artificial Intelligence algorthim, fully computational
  • Very well prediction with atomic accuracy.

Fig. 2: AlphaFold produces highly accurate structures. 1

How Alphafold works

Fig. 3: Basic workflow of Alphafold.

Alphafold can predict the potential structure from an amino acid sequence, super fast with fairly high accuracy.

Thanks!

References

Jumper, John, Richard Evans, Alexander Pritzel, Tim Green, Michael Figurnov, Olaf Ronneberger, Kathryn Tunyasuvunakool, et al. 2021. “Highly Accurate Protein Structure Prediction with AlphaFold.” Nature 596 (7873): 583–89.